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Monday, November 5, 2012

My swanky new wall calendar

FYI: I haven't won a single game of Yahtzee on that score sheet. Bryan has been kicking my trash lately.

So the book. I'm still working on it. I thought I was pretty close to being done with the making-projects part of it (again), but then I went through my notebook (which is funny because it's literally where I take notes for my book... get it?) and realized I still had several projects that needed tweaking or that I hadn't started on at all yet. But I'm still working steadily toward my goal to finish the rough draft by the end of the year!

But, actually, my expectations for that goal have changed some now that I'm getting a clearer picture of where I'm really at on things. Now my goal to have all of the projects finished and have all of the instructions written up in my notebook before the start of Thanksgiving break. Then between the end of Thanksgiving break and the beginning of Christmas break I want to work hard to type up all those lovely instructions, streamline/cohesify (just made up my own word) the whole whoppin' pile o' instructions for all of the projects, and see where I need to go from there.

So, in some ways, my goal to have a "finished rough draft" of the book by the end of this year is still my goal. But right now I'm really just focusing on getting the preliminary sewing done. Then I can focus on the writing. And then I can focus on making really pretty, spiffed-up versions of everything. And somewhere in there I'll work on trying to talk some really nice person into publishing this book.

Anyway, so the current goal = finish the sewing part. None of the sewing is hard (be so excited for this book someday, guys!), and I already have mental images and sketches of most all of these unmade projects, but I've felt kind of lost and wander-y about which ones to work on when. I made a list on my iPod last week of all of the projects I still need to make, but the list was daunting and it scared me more than helped me. Boo. So today I set out to make the list a little less daunting and a lot more doable. The answer? The fancy new book-project-a-day calendar I made for myself out of note pad paper. Jealous? You should be. It's pretty swanky.

The version you see above was version 1.0 and was trashed soon after I made and Instagramed it (@theredkitchenkatie) because Bryan kindly pointed out to me that I had totally left off a whole week. What can I say? I'm excited for Thanksgiving! Anyway, I scraped version 1.0 and made--you guessed it--version 2.0. The new and improved version consists of lots of little pieces of paper with the date on the top of each one. Then I went through my long, scary list and assigned two or three projects to each day. And now? Not so scary! In fact, I am pleased to report that there are three very tidy little check marks next to all three projects on today's list. So there.*

In some ways it feels like I'm still right smack dab in the middle of this whole book writing thing. Or still right smack dab at the very beginning of this whole book writing thing. But when nobody's looking I sneak away and think to myself, "This is finally coming together!"

*I'm pretty sure I've said "so there" in every post I've written so far this month, so, in honor of it being NaBloPoMo and all, I've decided to try and fit it into all of the rest of the posts this month. It'll be a fun little game we can play, like finding the mouse in all of those Graeme Base books.

4 comments:

I think I need to do that, because I keep coming up with more projects I want to get done for Christmas. And I am pretty sure I won't get them all done because they are still abstract and not written down anywhere!